A model need not be copied to be better. IMO there are lots of reasons for people to pursue their own ideas or ideas that don't require fundamental upgrades to

A model need not be copied to be better. IMO there are lots of reasons for people to pursue their own ideas or ideas that don't require fundamental upgrades to their operating system. I can also imagine doing the reverse of what you suggest in that libraries could implement fundamental mechanisms like RPCs and the file model would just be one form of interface to them. This would enable all programs to work to a minimum level with a new source or sink of data. So you wouldn't need to rewrite code to be able to make it send data via your new RPC mechanism or dump data to your strange new distributed backup mechanism. That would be tremendously powerful. If you had to do something very specific then the choice to access it via a more complex API would be there. In fact if we forgot about files per se we could just look at models of access like: 1) sequential serial 2) low latency random access 3) heirarchical namespace 4) search-based namespace 5) high latency request/response That way a file manager for example, could treat a namespace like my remote ssh drive differently from my local disk which offered low latency random access by not trying to generate thumbnails on it and not blocking while reading the names in it. i.e. the file model is possibly too simple for its own good but that doesn't mean we couldn't make it better.